Fair-weather friends and brunch allies · 1:25pm Nov 8th, 2020
If you don't care about any of my political stuff, I started writing a dwarven crime procedural story. First chapter is live on Offprint. Otherwise, more after the break.
This has been a hard one to figure out how to write. If you aren't familiar with my ideas, I strongly recommend reading my other piece, "What capitalism isn't" first, since it defines what I mean when I use the word 'capitalism'. I'm also just really proud of it.
Anyway.
I think life would be easier on me if I just prefaced that liberals aren’t really my allies.
There’s this big thing, yeah? Liberals accuse the left of ideological purity, being unwilling to come to the negotiating table and accept the positions that achieve power. And there’s some truth to that.
The problem is, our goals aren’t the same. It’s not a linear scale of left and right, and even the political compass loses a really important bit of nuance.
My position is anticapitalist: I believe that the economic framework we live under will inevitably lead to harmful outcomes. There are alternatives, and I'm not especially picky about which one we go with, just as long as we stop using this one.
Liberals ultimately believe in capitalism. They think that it’s pretty good, better than the alternatives, and that the best we can do is alleviate its symptoms and its most harmful excesses.
Ultimately, a liberal sees capitalism as a wild horse that needs to be broken in, while an anticapitalist leftist sees it as a rabid dog that needs to be put down.
One of the biggest problems - one I had to deal with - was just seeing leftists as ‘like liberals, but more’. Further along a linear axis. But that is strictly not the case. It doesn’t help that we are allies insofar as we can identify the same symptoms and agree that they’re bad.
More often than not, though, liberals are just as hostile to leftist solutions as conservatives are, because they hold a capitalist position. Leftists are seen as unreasonable, extreme, and a ‘bad look’.
A big problem, though, is that because we live in a capitalist hellscape, the liberal position has incumbency advantage. Their positions don’t just take less work to implement, because it’s adjustments on the existing pattern, but they meet less resistance from people who benefit from the existing system.
And because the existing system is capable of creating massive inequalities, then the people who benefit from it also have a massively outsized ability to resist and limit change.
For this reason, leftists rarely gain advantage from alliances with liberals to form majority government. We’ll do it, because they’re better than the alternative, but liberals pride themselves on their ability to work with capitalists and see doing so as necessary to hold power. Leftists disagreeing with that position is just self-sabotaging, to them, because politics has to be about working with people you don’t like and coming to effective compromises.
But, like. Obama had an advisory team entirely vetted by Goldman Sachs, that later largely went on to chairman positions on the boards of companies they were supposed to regulate. He made the US the world’s leading oil producer and is proud of that?
He went very far out of his way to dismantle progressive and activist movements and bases because he saw them as a threat. The idea that we're really enemies and threats to each other cuts both way, and liberals maintain the defender's advantage.
Internationally, we also see this in just how hard Corbyn was gutted by Labour, we see it in how hard Labour was attacked in Australia by the Murdoch press this election in Australia, and we see it in who gets to benefit from foreign intervention.
This has been a hard thing for me to struggle with at the moment, though. Because ultimately I say that, and I have to ask myself; At what point is committing to a losing position for ideological reasons just a masturbatory exercise? What's the point of critiquing a sport you've given up on the idea of ever playing?
Because I can write you essay after essay about how the deck is stacked against us. About how it’s not really fair to blame the left’s failures exclusively on the left, because they’re playing an entirely different game. About how who ends up on the left - as Orwell would call us, the sandal-wearing, juice-drinking feminists - is a factor of circumstances more than an indictment of the ideas here. That is to say - it’s easy to be for the status quo when you benefit from it, so the people who are against it are more likely to exist outside it.
But like.
If I know that, and that it hasn’t got a chance, what’s the point? Why not just give up and be a liberal, since they at least have figured this out enough to get a solid grasp on power, actually have a chance at making positive change under this ruleset?
I’ve been reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography on Robert Moses, the architect of 21st century America. It’s a book about how an idealist discovered how to wield power in its rawest form, wield it effectively, and use it to make his dreams reality. His idealism taught him exactly how power could be gained and abused. He failed at fighting it. He grew bitter, and made his understanding of corruption work for him instead of against him. Very quickly he took to the idea that, because he was winning, his ideas were more correct.
He was pretty much a monster, and a profoundly successful one.
On the back of that book, on the recommendations list, there’s a quote from Obama. He says that it’s the book that, more than any other as a young man, shaped his view of politics.
I think about that a lot.
Here’s the thing. Biden winning, Biden beating Trump, is a victory. And it’s an important one. But we don’t get to go to brunch, because Biden is only an ally of convenience. Otherwise he is an enemy. It wasn’t Trump that beat Bernie Sanders. Whether you think he lost fairly is irrelevant - what matters is that Biden and Bernie were mutually exclusive options.
Biden still really did write that crime bill, tried to double the troop count in Afghanistan, wants to rebuild the US global security apparatus, strengthen the intelligence community again, and has credible sexual assault allegations against him. He wants to work with Republicans, and make compromises with them, rather than… you know, not doing that?
That doesn’t mean we can’t - shouldn’t - ally together against the greater enemy of actual fascism. Obviously. Biden is the lesser of two evils here, and for now that is enough.
But what I ultimately believe is that liberal-capitalism is the cause of the rot that Trump and other fascist movements fester in. And the lesser of two evils here cultivates that rot, lets it fester, and we are lucky that Trump was as incompetent as he was.
The point of sticking to a losing ideology, I think, is that it’s losing now, and will keep losing for a while yet. The point isn’t winning now, though.
It’s that I believe that liberals like Biden - like those in Australia, like the Blairites in Britain - will inevitably cause the conditions that prove the system doesn’t work, can’t work. That will cause people to see who’s been saying the right things all this time, who made the right predictions. Will see the contradictions in this system can’t be resolved.
The problem is that fascists are very good at predicting the failure of the system too. The same soil that makes socialism compelling seems to make fascism inevitable. That’s what we need to be ready for - to try and make sure those chips fall the right way when the promises of liberal reform fail.
This sucks. This sucks a lot. What I’m basically saying is that my beliefs can’t be obvious to anyone the system is working for, but that I’m counting on that system failing to the degree that what I’m saying looks more obvious in hindsight.
But failing to acquire power isn’t a failure. Might doesn’t make right, and winning isn’t proof your ideas are better. I’m all for democracy, but the control of information and resources aren’t democratic right now - without that, it’s very hard to justify to me that the popularity of ideas reflects their real value.
Nearly half of the voting population of the US just voted for Donald Trump, for Christ’s sake. I have to believe the problem lies with the system that causes that, and isn’t innate to those people.
Robert Moses proved he understood politics by dominating the system he lived in completely. He just happened to use that power to cover New York with bridges too low for busses to drive under, because he really hated poor people. He could do that, because his understanding of power meant he dismantled all democratic controls and accountability that threatened him.
He could do that because it benefited the people who could have stopped him. He made sure of that.
We face the opposite problem. Our ideas are a threat to everyone who benefits from this system, a system that allows men like Jeff Bezos to exist. But so long as the system allows for men like Jeff Bezos to exist, it will fail.
Liberals and leftists are allies until the failures of liberalism are so obvious and unavoidable that the status quo is untenable. We’re getting closer to that point, we’re already seeing it, and the next fascist won’t be nearly as incompetent.
Maybe at that point we can talk about the issue of global warming without couching it in the language of market solutions and austerity, we can keep oil in the ground before it kills us all, we can build an internationalist movement that doesn’t benefit from the exploitation of poorer nations that allows them to move past the need for fossil fuel as well. Abolish the IMF, forgive global debts, and move our economic resources to where they’re needed.
And pro-capitalist liberals are just as opposed to all that as conservatives are, in their actions if not their rhetoric.
We could do all of it, if we wanted to. We need to, if we want to survive the century as a species.
Ultimately, we both want me to be wrong here. If liberal-capitalists are correct in their understanding of power and what they want to use it for, the conditions where real socialism becomes a viable political movement never happen.
We are allies for as long as it takes to find out that’s wrong, and both of us are hoping that’s the case. It should just be seen as our job to be prepared for that failure, and to act in that moment when it comes.
If socialists are angry, hateful, aggressive or unreasonable, it’s because they are by and large the people who have already been forced to be aware of the failures of the system, have been failed by it. Yet somehow we are the assumed allies of the people who most want to defend it?
Essentially, we’re waiting for the system to fail enough other people that we can agree to change it, and the best thing we can do is be people’s best option when it fails them.
We are not volunteers for the culture wars - we are, all of us, conscripts.
Thanks for writing it.
For quite some time I tend to think capitalism works in such overburner mode (like all modern big emire politics) exactly because it tries to overvolt/overclock some questionable traits in humans, rather trying to balance them. Capitalsm is so bad because humans who use it can't stand down/step aside from their positions of power, help those 'under' them simply because this is logical/humane/social animal way to do life ... It like have rocket backpack pointing skyward. It accelerates you instead of slowing down, because it works by adding more velocity to something you already will gain 'naturally'. Sure, impacts and flight itself tend to be spectacular. But so are crashes.
It seems humans were forced to overwork themselves and everything else. And now we have no idea (?) how to step outside of such system, because apart from minority of power hoggers there is even sizeable amount of population who believe it still works.
I don't know, I hope there will be discovery/rediscovery of some psychological resistance techniques, so it will be possible for ppl to see how they manipulated and resist it. But I'm lost at even generic directions to there ... And all this Internet not helping. Because humans must apply ideas to themselves, and be honest about what work and what is not. And this is hard problem in ..I prefer term upbringing over 'education' now, because formally most of those people in USA/Au/EU are educated ... but results ....
So this isn't your main point and I'm sorry to be rude but your terminology and thus your conclusion is innacurate. People like Bernie Sanders and Elizbeth Warren are extremely liberal capatlists, meaning they are capitalists with heavy state control. Socialism has many systems but broadly it is the end of competition and profit. No candidate or major party in any country supports this. They all want money to exist or for socialist systems that have money they all want doctors to be paid more then custodians(even if that diffrence in a highly liberal capitalist system is very small it is still a diffrence). So leftists also want to break in capitalism they are just more extreme in their breaking in. I suggest reading Adam Smith and an introduction to socialist theory which goes more indepth and in fact talks more about it(I got somethings wrong in the name of simplification)https://iep.utm.edu/socialis/
5394417
This comment is explicitly why I linked the thing I did at the top
When talking about the 2016 election, I use this as justification for allowing Trump to win. 2020 was a bit dicier because Biden isn't really all there anymore either.
I just want to know Vlade's reaction to his prediction of a Trump win not working out.
5394422
Sorry for not reading that first. Though i will say that is not all what capitalism is. That statement is true for Capatlism, Mercantilsim, Feudlism, and whatever you would call the system in antiquity. Capitalism is you have ownership of all the production of your property plus the idea labor is a resource in the same way wood or steel is and that both money and the goods and services it can buy are inherently valuable.
Honestly, while I largely agree with you, I think you're skipping a few steps here. The best thing the new administration can do is implement ranked choice voting in place of the winner-takes-all system we have right now. This would enable more political parties to exist, expanding options for the left and the right. Then socialists like us would have a separate, viable platform. Namely this one, which I wholeheartedly support. Seriously, everybody who voted blue last week should read this, the People's Party is just what we need.
5394442
I do always appreciate some fireworks.
5394453
not exactly comment about party you mention, but in general .. Today I'm quite afraid of parties or even just organized groups because they tend to suck (literally) you for goals they said are aligned with yours, yet in reality it all goes to the top, and you are sucked and replaced with fresh blood.
In general, I read post from offprint (it strangely only worked in recent firefox, but not in my older seamonkey broswer) and I think some pyramidal effects are missed from analysis (but it was already quite long). I mean, problem today is less one vs one relations, but fact few can concentrate a lot of power, ability to direct and stop people. And voluntary collectives at least in current climate more fragile and can't easily outperform professional _unvoluntary_ "bands". My own case: truely community-created drivers or applications tend to lag behind those created in corporations, corporations drive their engineers quite hard, and there is no endless supply of people who can code GPU driver or video editor! {and those who can do such programming usually sucked one way or another into corporation, paid-for structures, where they used in some specific direction {like, creating DRM layer in video stack, so intellectual-property layers will be happy}... and not others}
It seems our imagination used against us - we are lead to assume we all can {and should?!} live like rich, yet rich live their lives by already overexploiting people and environment and fucking our future - everyone doing so (even with automation) will be quite bad idea to strive for.
And again, materially-speaking high capitalists already live in some sort of communism - they have a lot of ...stuff. And power. And they tend to be shit to ones below. I don't want the same problem just transferred to everyone. (so my focus on psychology).
I really dislike when people just thrown hierarhist remarks like those metaphors about "Ultimately, a liberal sees capitalism as a wild horse that needs to be broken in, while an anticapitalist leftist sees it as a rabid dog that needs to be put down. " - yes, this is metaphor, but for me it says a lot about how our thinking still operates. Fuck below ones, as long as you think this doesn't affect you.... (there was long thread on libcom forums about 'animal question', but guess most leftists still drop it without any thinking, despite existence of this long thread. Because fundamentally they doesn't give a flying hug about all those unimportant sub-creatures). As I said to my friend yesterday in chat ...
I even come to conclusion all this much {self}praised intellectualism is not real, at least it is much more about repeating some already-formulated problems than about seeing new connections and looking at altering root causes of our problems (political populism obscures financial reality, financial reality is here due to psychology, and psychology is daughter of biology and society we are raised in ...)
5394446
I mean, if two people are using two different definitions of a word, they're never going to understand each other.
P1: Assume [X] = 100
P2: No it isn't
5394453
Considering how the current system benefits them, that's probably going to be a hard sell.
5394493
Kind of? Right now, with Gerrymandering and the Electoral College, it benefits Republicans. So if they're already going to be fixing our voting system, they might as well go all out.
Good blog post!
I think this is a really good way to phrase it, but mostly because it exactly describes the transition I went through over the last four years. In 2016, I was a liberal who believed that capitalism/America was flawed and thought the Democratic Party had better ideas for how to manage those flaws. In 2020, I'm a leftist who believes that the flaws are features, and that the Democratic Party is either controlled opposition on behalf of the capitalist class or so far up their own crowd-pleasing asses that they're functionally useless.
But still, yeah, the choice this year was between neoliberalism and fascism, and the neoliberals at least think death camps are bad PR, so this outcome was good. Gives us half a chance to wait until one side is proven wrong without resorting to violence in the meantime, as you said.
One place I disagree, though, is about the impending rise of a competent fascist. (Disclaimer: this is another place where my opinion has changed recently, and it could very possibly be naivety driving that change.) Simply put, I don't believe there can be such a thing--"competent fascist" is an oxymoron. Trump was able to do what he did not in spite of being an idiot, but specifically because he was an idiot. He was pathologically dedicated to white grievance politics, nationalism, dictatorial measures in service of his own ego--all the stuff that makes fascism what it is--to the point that it completely destroyed him politically, and that's what made him appealing to the fascists among our population, because they've done the same kinds of things to destroy their own lives. The very thing that made fascism rise--has always made it rise--is invariably what led to its downfall, because fascism is a death cult that cannibalizes itself until only idiot true believers are left.
Tom Cotton is a wannabe authoritarian psychopath, but he can't whip a crowd into a frenzy over the "war on Christmas" or the environmental regulations that make toilets not flush as good. Ted Cruz is a slimy far-right menace, but he can't form a cult of personality out of people who know his inner thoughts are exactly as shallow and hateful and stupid as theirs. Even Alex Jones probably wouldn't work out, because Trump already did the loud-angry-rambling thing, and it just won't be the same without Trump doing it. Fascism is still a threat and will always be a threat, but there will be never be a person clever enough to stoke fascist sentiments while also executing on a long-term strategy for maintaining power, because fascists won't follow someone if they don't believe that cult leader is willing to die with them.
I'm largely in agreement with your points and I'd like to second Aquaman's praise of the wild horse/mad dog metaphor. Capitalism hangs on with the tenacity of a religion, because it, too, is a system of beliefs that are not based in evidence. Unfortunately, that makes it just as hard to challenge, because its defenses are based in faith, not reason.
Just as people are gradually becoming less religious, I think they are also losing faith in Capitalism, so there is hope for the future. But, as both are easy paths to unearned power, it will be a distant future, I'm afraid.
5394499
Why would they want to fix the system? Making it truly reflect the wants of the citizens would guarantee they would lose power. They may futz with it to bias it in their favor, but there will never be a willing reform of any substance that isn't driven by catastrophe.
5394561
That's one of the best summations of fascist leadership that I've ever read.
Phew, great post. My contrarian-vision is highlighting a few things I disagree with, but they are largely nitpicks. I will say for now that "If I know that, and that it hasn’t got a chance, what’s the point?" is a thought that us black people have had to deal with in Amerikkka for 500 years. If they can keep pushing forward regardless, white leftists have no excuses. (By the way, you're all welcome for those black votes in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and
the future capital of New AfrikaAtlanta.)Maybe I'll write something more after I've had my fill of ANARCHO-BIDENIST shitposts and MAGA tears.
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/348242526542626820/774552754139561984/C8XRKAF.png
Great blogpost sir!
hell yeah i agree good post love it
5394499
As iisaw said, doing that might just engineer their own obsolescence, and they definitely won't want that.
I'm closer to the center than the far left, which may make it dangerous to post here (please don't hurt me downhooves ow ow ow), but I think I can explain what it will take to get me, and probably many other people who share my outlook, on your side:
Show me. This means two things.
First, I need you to point to a culture or a comprehensive study where what you want to do clearly works and has reasonable parallels to my society. I'm not going to vote for completely redesigning how society works without strong scientific evidence that supports your case, because if you happen to be incorrect, the results could be absolutely disastrous. For example, single-payer health care has very strong evidence supporting it, namely dozens of countries with high approval ratings of their health care system by citizens, so I'm totally behind that idea. Universal basic income is not quite there yet, but there are many studies being conducted in other countries and even some in the United States that may prove it works. Pure communism, on the other hoof, has not yet functioned as envisioned for any group larger than about 300 people (at which point you need some degree of hierarchical governance and accountability), so you'll need plenty more research to sell me on that one.
Second, I'm not going to vote for radical changes if you can't get popular support for them first, because it will only hurt other causes that are also important to me. I have known people who have died from policy decisions. My transgender friends have suffered a great deal under the recent administration, and people who didn't vote for Biden in the general election selfishly contributed to that death and suffering because no other candidate stood the slightest chance of winning or hitting the 5% mark. Idealism is a fun game, but utility is what saves lives. For example, most people support universal background checks and Medicare for All. Those are things I can get strongly behind, and the only reason we don't have them already is that our democracy is kind of screwed up buy the manner in which politicians are purchasable—and yes, that's capitalism's fault, but that doesn't mean the easiest solution to removing that problem is advocacy for policies most Americans strongly oppose.
See, I don't just care about the idea of change. I care about actual change. And to get actual change, you need empirical evidence your approach will work better than what we already have, and you need to convince the public. Do those things and I'm behind you 100%.
oh, I like this line
terribly true, all this
always hate the wait, but time will bring change
5394561
I think that's a really good point, but I also think Trump was unique in his level of incompetence. I'm more scared of people like Steve Bannon than Tom Cotton.
5394825
It doesn't and can't really work like that, and that sucks. But socialism has succeeded for large groups of people. Cuba's quality-of-life against its income-per-capita is insane, the Keralas in India have achieved revolutionary increases in quality of life from even a modest socialist project, and communism was still favoured by a majority of the population when the USSR fell - when the wall fell, so did Russian life expectancy by ten years.
But what we're proposing hasn't been done before - attempting this in the imperial core, the heart of Rome itself. We can't prove this works without trying it. There is no scientific way to test it without doing it, and we don't know what happens when it's attempted in a way that world powers don't intervene against it. I would like to point to you the success of socialist Chile and its Cybersyne program, but America went and helped murder Allende and made the country a fascist dictatorship.
Likewise, I would like to point to the successes of socialist Yugoslavia. But a twenty year project by the US state department, which involved massive backing of Nazis - not neonazis, the same ones from WW2 - led to the civil war that it could justify intervening in. And then they did so many warcrimes that the area has the highest incidence of cancer in all of Europe due to how much deplete uranium was shot into their arable land.
I would love to point to the success of Thomas Sankara, but the French had him killed, his project dismantled.
Personally, I highly recommend "Women have Better Sex under Socialism" by Ghodsee and "Blackshirts and Reds" by Parenti as good books for historical accounts, and "Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast, "Austerity Ecology" by Leigh Phillips, "Four Futures" by Peter Frase and "The Divide" by Jason Hickel for contemporary accounts for why capitalism will fucking kill us all, no matter how much you try to reform it. I'm also partway through "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" right now, and I'd probably put that pretty high on my recommendation list as an introductory or primer book.
For the second point - "I won't vote for radical change because it's radical change" - those radical changes are often insanely popular. More popular than the 'reasonable' incrementalist options. But because they're more radical they're less supported, and this attitude is probably hugely due to what Jay Rosen calls "The Cult of Savvy".
Again, as Chomsky emphasizes heavily in Manufacturing Consent, what is acceptable discourse is filtered through the context of mass and mainstream media, which have owners and agendas. Unless you can believe that the Washington Post being owned by Jeff Bezos has no effect on its editorial policy, then a fundamental problem is that those ideas are always going to be portrayed as unpopular and radical - regardless of how much people would otherwise go for them - because of that filtering effect. I personally believe Parenti's "Inventing Reality" is the better book, but of course I would
We have to support those ideas to lead others to support them, because we know they're good and right. We can settle for compromise but, again, the goal of these ideas should be to convince other people to believe them and not to figure out what other people already believe and go with that.
As to why fascism is so popular when the downside of capitalism is in full display, I once read a saying that “fascism is a series of wrong answers to the right questions”.
In the US Democratic Party, there are two types of activists: the woke left and the socialists. The woke left has been embraced by the leadership because they are libs and do not change anything meaningful for the larger structural problems of a capitalist economy. The socialists get treated like Bernie.
5394825
If you wait for change to have popular support before voting for it, change will never come.
5394995
I appreciate the response. There are things here I do agree with, some facts I'm rather certain are not well-supported by the data, and other information I simply don't know about and need to educate myself on.
I'll look into this when I have time.
5395029
Like which?
5395013
If you vote for something that doesn't have popular support among the voters, I'm not exactly sure how you expect that to pan out.
It is ridiculous to see people still talking about the notion of a Left-Liberal alliance. The Entryists doing this are like someone who keeps trying to gatecrash a party and then, while getting dragged out by security, complains about how the party sucks and everyone there hates them and the feeling is mutual. Then as soon as they're chucked out into the dumpster in the alleyway, they start looking for another back door in to waste everyone's time yet again with a banana peel and an empty coffee can on their head. The Liberals throwing the party have made it quite clear you're not welcome, that they do not want or need you, and that they'd rather invite war criminals and racists and they have always been that way and they will always be that way.
Even when viewed from that narrow perspective where the soft fascism of the New Dealers is something you want and electoralism is a way to have it, FDR at his peak only got a couple percentage points more of the American electorate than Trump (34% vs 30%). The assertion that, "well, if we only had a bit more democracy everything would work out quite alright" is proven wrong at every turn. Australia has ranked-choice voting and what comes of that? Oh, this or that policy polls well, great, but the opposite policy idea also polls well. The idea that there is some rational decision making that aggregates out of markets or polls is among the most absurd Enlightenment era fallacies.
Which shouldn't be interpreted as saying there's a value in aligning in with the right wing of fascism, because they'll just shoot you the first time they throw you out of the Party. I mean, it definitely is less humiliating to be a Strasser than a Sanders or a Corbyn because at least Hitler had the courtesy to put Strasser out of his misery instead of letting the farce drag on, but neither "alliance" is at all useful.
In terms of Climate Change, Citations Needed only went halfway. The truth is, both wings of fascism betray the difference between their espoused belief and true feeling. The Right may say they don't believe in it, but their actions (putting up walls, building concentration camps and work camps, etc) reveal that they believe in Climate Change, and they are building their fortress to endure it and they are building the fortress with multiple layers such that, say, 50% of the electorate might be located in between the inner and outer walls and that's good enough to make that 50% into loyal supporters since they're glad to see one wall at least. Meanwhile, the Liberals treat the whole thing as yet another opportunity for grift.
5395030
For one, the highest rate of cancer in Europe is not where you're suggesting it is and studies are mixed on the health effects of depleted uranium in the environment. DU does lead to an increased incidence of birth defects and health issues (it's a toxic metal regardless as to how radioactive it is), though the absolute effect size is not as large as you seem to suggest...
...but I don't want to nitpick on that because it doesn't matter for the point you're trying to make. That point is largely correct. We do bad things in other countries, and fail to clean up after ourselves or even protect and support our own troops (see also Gulf War Syndrome). Land mines are a more obvious example where you don't need medical studies to show how many children have had their limbs blown off by an indiscriminate, civilian-killing weapon the United States continues to defend.
Also, I don't think lauding the "quality of life" in Cuba makes much sense if you've ever met a Cuban expat. Raw numbers aside (no pun intended) there's a reason families risk death to flee Cuba.
I don't think you're being intentionally deceptive or are way off-base, there are just red flags that pop up for me as I'm reading through. I may try to do a more thorough look-see later and ask questions, but it's difficult for me to concentrate due to my ME/CFS so I am very slow. I appreciate your detailed response and I want to dive into this more with you later.
5395187
I think the cancer thing was true at the time I read it, but it's an old resource. So I'll cede that point.
You know, I hear this a lot. But I also know an agricultural scientist who spent the last two years living in Cuba, and is trying to move there full time. The person who spends the most time emphasizing this to me is a recent Cuban expat.
..... this is just a comment, but ... I simply can't see how all this can be moved forward EN MASSE. Until you have Princess Luna skywriting your message every night, or timestorm blowing plenty of humans fast-forward into future (so remaining can actually try new things, idea credit to Starscribe) I can't see how mass of current humans can change their/our course fast enough (decades or faster).
Because for trying new things you must be brave, cooperative, and ready to build something against current expectations. Today's humans apparently too afraid to loose their dismishing positions in current society vs trying Big New Thing (and small new thing tend to be absorbed into existing body of problem!). When things become real bad - revolutions (uprisings) starts, but ...with same unprotected humans same mistakes repeat themselves :( I don't know how to broke out of this :( I mean same type of humans take power, and they unable to see their self-contradictions, and not allow others to fix them ..:(
This is why I think anarchism has something new to say - more on practical part, now to _train_ anti-hierarchism in normal humans, so they will be ready to do something new both as workers and as (temporary?) leaders .... Autonomous thinking require some .... time, thinking power, reflection, etc .... I think in so harsh terms about education exactly because there turned out to be NONE of it working towards those goals ... mass education was happening WITHOUT generating type of humans who can see world's trajectory clearly and act accordingly :( So, effectively, there is no practice so far to lean on :/ It all must be experimented with ...and as you can guess even on small level (school/family/small community) changing things is .....not simple. You can win via talk - but how many will follow up with consistent acts?
5395581
Something to remember about American Cubans is that if you ask what their families were before they became expats, you'll hear stories that eerily resemble business owners like Bezos and Elon Musk rising on the backs of others. They'll tell you they miss the white beaches and the calm oceans (before the hurricanes keep battering them recently), but any left-leaning person worth their analyzing salt should know why they would flee to a capitalist state if they thought they could not make it in a socialist one.
5394995
Stare at Bolivia now. They have leftist parties united under more indigenous representation and rule, and, from what I know of how Venezuela acted, looks to use up their resources on their own terms rather than how the bigger western countries want it (that meme of Elon Musk wanting to coup Evo for the country's lithium should come to mind). The big player in their world now is going to be China, and that's gonna be a can of worms on how progressive they want their country to go.
Anyways, good to see you're still around, MrNumbers.
5395031
"I don't want to be first" is a self-defeating cop-out. If you honestly want change, then you have to lead change. Refusing to fight for change, and waiting for someone else to enact change, is nothing but just tacit support for the status quo. At best, it's glorified apathy.
5395581
The bulk of Cuban expats were the capitalist class, who were looking at seeing themselves forcibly divested of their wealth and privilege under the new regime; and the "underground capitalist" class, the drug pushers, pimps, and hustlers who thrived off pandering to the privileged classes and the seedier side of the tourist economy.
The majority of the remainder of the expats were criminals and the mentally ill; which Castro's government forcibly pushed out of Cuban society, primarily via the Mariel boatlift. Now, this sounds pretty awful on its face, and it certainly was to some extent; but you have to keep in mind that the US had basically been treating Cuba as a de facto vassal state and playground for the wealthy and privileged since shortly after the Spanish-American War. This had caused serious long-term problems for Cuba's economy, which by that point had only two major industries, sugar and tourism; both of which were inextricably dependent on the United States, and the collapse of either of which could easily have caused irreparable economic damage. Needless the say, when the revolution occurred, and the mass exodus of the privileged took place, Fidel's government (who were perfectly willing to let the expats leave) saw it as an opportunity to both divest themselves of their criminal element, as well as strike back at the US in one of the very few ways available to them.
The small percentage who didn't fall into these two categories were the "undesirables" in Cuban society -- mainly LGBTQ+ and some ethnic minorities. A problem which was at least as much the fault of the fact that Cuba was (and still is) predominantly and staunchly Roman Catholic, with all the religious bigotry that implies. Racism was also rife in Cuba prior to the the revolution, as situation which did improve significantly under the communist government, but which is beginning to devolve with it's shift back towards capitalism.
Cuban society has definitely had it's problems, and is not one that I'd personally want to hold up as a "success story" of socialism; but that owes at least as much to do with the constant pressures on it from Imperial powers such as the US and Russia, as it does to any failures inherent to communism itself (for the record, I'm not a communist, nor do I play one on the Internet).
5396599
You misunderstand what I meant.
I have no problem with advocating for something in order to gain popular support. I do have a problem with putting an initiative on the ballot or running a candidate with a position when that initiative or position don't have anything close to the popular support needed to win.
So no, I'm not advocating apathy or simply waiting for the Overton window to change. I'm all for building support. But don't run candidates who have no chance of winning, or candidates who may win, but whose positions on issues you want to change aren't popular enough to be implemented even if they win. Doing this creates more backlash against what you're trying to do, and is counterproductive. Build momentum first.
Also: "I don't want to be first" is absolutely true if what you mean by that is diving head-first into a dangerous civic experiment with no data to back up your chances of success. I won't sign off on an experiment that could have disastrous repercussions. Science has to come first.
5396599
I'd throw in that most of what's said here happened two generations ago. I'm also critical of those things, but Cuba still exists today and is not just that moment in time - and while it's still very poor, it's probably one of the better parts of the world to be poor in.
5396693
Thing is - someone MUST do it, first and few other steps, and compare results.. And see how it scales ....
5397057
You should familiarize yourself with how they're conducting local experiments in universal base income around the world. You don't have to make something the law of the land, you can test it out first. Not complicated.
5397057
The biggest problem with experiments in the US is that it is too easy to move to a different state. This means that if your experiment is too successful, it will cause a rush of migrants to your state which may overwhelm the resources and leave everyone worse off than if you had done the experiment. However, if the same policy were pursued by the Federal government, it would be successful because it would not have the distortion of internal migration.
I have to admit, these last 4 years really HAVE made me look at my "Capitalism with socialist reigns" outlook and consider if that really is better, or merely just barely practical in the face of "gleeful utterly unrestrained fuck the poor capitalism". Nor has every new year at Amazon done much to endear me to any kind of capitalist system.
An excellent blog post, sir! I'd been planning an essay sometime in the future in which I critiqued liberals, but I'd say you did a fair better job at it than I would have!